Design and Art Australia Online

A Widening Gap: The Intervention, 10 Years On witnesses a world that is remote from the essential services that the rest of Australia takes for granted. The tenth anniversary of the introduction of “the Intervention” — the Northern Territory National Emergency Response — has come and gone.

The touring exhibition Open Cut: Jacky Green, Sean Kerins, Therese Ritchie brings to life the power imbalance between mining companies and Aboriginal peoples on whose country minerals and natural gas are extracted while they remain in poverty. The installation combines stories, photography and painting and a timeline history graphic of the southwest Gulf of Carpentaria gathered through multiple consultations in 2017.

Zero Metres Above Sea Level presents an inter-tidal world where different cultures and sciences meet. It brings together artwork from two sites located at mean sea level: Blue Mud Bay, a famous place in Northeast Arnhem Land, home to the respected Yolngu clans, and Heron Island, a respected research station on the Great Barrier Reef.

Elastics / Borracha / Elástico witnesses Timor Leste’s reconstruction through the eyes of four artists who travelled to eleven of the thirteen districts in a mobile residency in late 2012. The artists recorded everyday life and the inspirational work of women weavers and traditional builders whose resilient cultural upkeep subversively aided the forty-year liberation struggle.

Ghost Citizens follow us and infiltrate our daily lives. In a continent full of the ghosts and shadows of colonialism, the historical, social, and physical landscape is pitted. Each story is a ghost story loaded with shadows – a kind of ‘scar’ story. Djon Mundine OA

This sampler exhibition and round-table at The Cross Art Projects reviews the Cementa13 experiment — a wildly successful contemporary art festival with a serious theoretical substructure, held recently in Kandos in the NSW tablelands.

Feminage frames collage as one aspect of the diverse legacy of feminist art practice. In the 1970s, informed by feminism, gay rights and conceptual art, women artists created a logic of collage, together with a feminine subjectivity composed from alien forms, the domestic and child’s-play associations. Collage’s dynamic, chimerical logic of fragmentation and suture continues to open new angles on sexual, post-colonial and cultural identities.

Green Bans Art Walk and Exhibition
A collaborative project by The Cross Art Projects and BigFagPress
Green Bans Art Walks presented by Performance Space

Walk speakers: Wendy Bacon, Meredith Burgmann, Christopher Dean, Michael Davies, Jim Donovan, Michael Dysart, Joe Owens, Stacey Miers, Merilyn Fairskye, Ian Milliss and more.

Twining: Weaving and abstraction brings together weaving and abstraction, material and form. Four artists experiment with the nexus between the opposing registers of high and traditional art to explore ideas of cultural circulation and, in this exhibition, the critical process of colonial cultural intersections.

Exhibitions by Maria Cruz combine anecdote, art history and philosophy. The title for her first survey exhibition, Oo, means Yes in Filipino. We are asked to contemplate the ambiguous space behind the letters Oo. Like an amateur hypnotist Maria Cruz draws out speculative discussion as a corrective to an over-designed and corporate world.

Riotous Suburbs presents threads of arguments about the economics and politics of space, housing, distribution and access as governments turn to private market solutions to housing needs. The artists essay the protest and civil unrest that has shadowed a decade of privatisation and great comfort for some.

Utopia Limited adapts the Biennale of Sydney’s ‘Zones of Contact’ theme to question its host city, a place where lifestyle is pathological and the charm of the surface rests on uneasy exclusions. These artists engage with the notion of urban landscape as historic archive. A politics of landscape based on entry or exclusion is brought home.

The exhibition reflects on these sorry days of government manipulation of unions and the introduction of divisive industrial laws, on the curbing of civil liberties and the strangling of access to information. It also identifies a strong neo-conceptual critical and aesthetic strain within contemporary Australian art practice that interacts with global concerns and local political topics.

An exhibition documenting how politicians, businessmen and public servants secretly carved up the inner-city road network in a calculated bid to force drivers into a private toll tunnel. The exhibition is about the venality of selling off public roads, wilfully restricting public transport, folly and lies and the howls of anger from gridlocked traffic. It’s a fast ride through public-private partnerships Sydney style.

The rich colours and intricate compositions of traditional miniature painting are an unlikely form of war documentation in the age of embedded journalism, selective briefings and non-stop cable television.

The Kuradji/Sandon Point Aboriginal Tent Embassy (SPATE) is a rallying point in the debate about urban development in sensitive coastal environments with significant Aboriginal heritage. There has been a decade of protests and a picket and Aboriginal tent embassy on the site on the Illawarra coast between the villages of Thirroul and Bulli below Sydney.

Coordinated by south coast artist Dootch Kennedy.

The exhibition of his paintings, sketches and posters reveals his commitment to the Peace and Civil Rights movements, the Green Bans and workplace politics. It includes rare remnants of the ephemeral 'poster exhibitions’ held in union halls and workplaces from the 1940s to 1960s. Particularly timely is a splendid work celebrating the Centenary of the Eureka Stockade, 1854–1954.
Co-curator Mona Brand

An exhibition and roundtable of artists, architects, designers, local business and activists exploring ways to reignite Kings Cross’s famous neon lights